You are making all the right moves, you feel on the top of the world, smart, dashing… and then reality comes crashing down…
- the game you were playing bottoms out: you lose
- the person you were charming says something like: I have to go to pee
- the product you produced, book, website, whatever, attracts no response
- your carefully crafted story falls flat on its face… and lots of more examples I could give…
- won the battle but lost the war… with your husband, your child, winning the argument but losing the love
What happened? What the f… happened? For the most part you are dumbfounded. After all if you could see what you did, after the fact, this would not happen as often as it does. To you, and to most people…
What happened is that you lost sight of the big picture.
My buddy, Genghis Khan employed it, the feign, 1 to great success… this is how he crashed the gathered European armies in Hungary in 1421.
Overconfidence, eagerness, neediness… all make you a prime target for the feign,
The only way not to get destroyed by it is to lift your head and look again. Look at the big picture.
But you are so sure of the victory, you can taste it. But you want it soooo much!
Behaving this way, in the small picture, got you where you are, and yet you are still vulnerable, you haven’t learned your lesson. Not in the least.
Who uses this tactic? The tactic of the feign?
- Cults, like the Mormon Church… but truly, this is one of the hallmarks of a cult: they wary they suck you in, and then the jaws shut tight.
They are actually teaching their disciples to look for people in a vulnerable state: in a transition, divorce, retirement, loss of a job, death of a close person.
Anything for the person just to get some certainty, the smell of a life after the transition.
- Even legitimate programs use it to get new “students”, new “participants”, however they call them. It is all designed to entrap you.
- Chiropractor marketing teaches chiropractors to do it.
- Churches, mosques, recruit converts from among the vulnerable.
- ISIS has entire training schools for recruiters.
- The CIA uses it to turn people to spy against their own country.
- the examples are so numerous, I could fill volumes with the list. The lure (hear it? it is the basis of fishing as well!) of what is normally unattainable, what seems out of reach, is suddenly there, like a promise! Who wouldn’t follow it, right? Siren songs? Lorelei? The Odyssei?
So, you are not alone to fall victim to the technique. But you may become the first who doesn’t go all the way… who lifts your head, and look again, at the big picture.
Will you be the first? Or will you be fodder?
- feign and trap, feign and enslave, feign and destroy. Feign is a pretense to draw you in, to make you pursue the faint smell of victory, riches, love, whatever seems to be suddenly attainable.
